Confessions Of A Teenage DRAM Queen

Oh man, my speaking gig at Bumbershoot in Seattle was a FANTASTIC time. They might post audio of my talk soon, but it won’t make as much sense if you can’t see my presentation. I’ll see if there’s a way to sync them up. Having taken this leap, I am officially available for speaking gigs. Do you have an event that needs an informative, inspirational and pretty-damn-funny talking guy? That’s me! Let me know. Enormous thanks to my good friend Corn Mo for arranging the whole thing. He has a new song about Frankenstein which I absolutely LOVE.

Wrapping up this storyline in the next comic or two. Then… big changes for HE. I’m super nervous, but excited about going in a new direction.

Those interested in goods from The HE Store should watch this space. I’m not saying the biggest blowout sale I’ve ever run is around the corner, but that is exactly what I am not yes are too saying. I’m saying that.

They seem like a throwback to the art that HE had when you started. I kind of prefer the “pre- five fingers” art, when the characters had round eyes instead of narrow rectangles. I felt they were a lot more expressive. Just my opinion – I still like the comic though! 8^)

If anything this comic is representative of the EXACT OPPOSITE of what I was drawing when the comic first started. I had no control, no perspective, no idea what I was doing. Big expressive faces are one tool in the toolbox. Conveying subtle emotions is MUCH harder to do. Not ever situation requires your biggest hammer.

I don’t necessarily CHANGE every setting, but I will go through every tab of every preference pane of every application just to make sure there isn’t a better option than the default. I sometimes change things to see if I like them and then change them back when I decide the old way was better. I don’t do it to other people’s computers, though…with one exception. If they’re using IE I will replace it with Firefox.

I feel it is my responsibility to point out that I am only borrowing your tech-meddler tendencies to create a fictional drama. Even though this all all basically 100% true (other than the email reading), I was never actually this mad about it. This is just a means to a larger end in the story. Also fuck natural scrolling to death.

Tobacco, even outside of cigarettes, is still pretty damn bad for you. You know what else is natural? Hemlock. Poison dart frogs. Deadly nightshade. What is this “natural” fetish that makes you think natural things are better than anything else? And HFCS is still just sugar that comes from corn. Who gives a fuck how big a word they use? It’s fructose. The same sugar that’s in all-natural apples, or strawberries, or whatever other fruit you wanna name. Stop being scared of big words.

WOW, the internet is SERIOZ BIZNEZ to you. Relax and take a breath, dude.

From just one joke and a reply, you extrapolate that I have a “natural” fetish? Natural doesn’t automatically make something good, it just signifies that it wasn’t made by fucking around in a lab or processing it within an inch of it’s life.

Nah, dispelling ignorance is srs bsns to me. So is food, actually. You seem to be the one who’s not relaxed, here, but okay. As glad as you know being natural isn’t the be-all and end-all of healthy food. And science isn’t teh evil…labs are not terrible by their very existence. Just because something was made by humans does not make it bad.

You really need to learn to stop making assumptions. I never said that making something in a lab makes it bad (Life saving medications are made in labs! That’s Good!), just that I prefer not to eat something that’s spent more time getting tinkered with in a factory than the time it takes for me to digest it and excrete it from my anus. I’d rather just eat an apple off a tree than eat an apple that been processed down to a paste, mixed with 42 different chemicals and fillers, and then sold as “health bars”.

I had a brother-in-law (notice “had”) who would borrow the family’s computer, change all the settings, download new programs, remove already installed programs, and then leave without setting ANYTHING back to where it started. And then he couldn’t figure out why the entire rest of the family didn’t like it.
And he wasn’t doing it out of any kind of “knowledge” about the subject, either.

I have a friend with a similar problem. Her cousin will borrow her laptop without asking, then change the settings to his liking, and then torrents god-knows-what from god-knows-where, which ends up clogging her computer with that shit from Russian hackers that keeps popping up a fake virus warning in order to trick you into going to a site that lets them access your computer. (I know this because she asks me to fix up the mess her cousin made and restore the settings and “clean” it out.)

One of my aunts is an infamous tech meddler. Now if she only had a freaking clue about what she was doing I probably wouldn’t mind it so much.

But being the family “tech guy’ I’m the idiot who is stuck undoing whatever fresh hell she calls me up about at odd hours and on the weekends.

Some of her “gems”

“I think I might have changed the TCP/IP settings on this. What are TCP/IP settings by the way?”

“Hey, just a quick question…how do you change the language back to English if you clicked on Estonian just to see what it’d be like?”

“Why do they let you just throw stuff away from your computer if it’s so damn important?”

(This was said in reference to her accidentally deleting a shitload of DLL files she thought were “cluttering up” her computer. DLL files she wouldn’t normally have access to by the way since I removed her as an administrator on her own computers. But I was over at her house fixing something else, and signed in on that computer, but I foolishly left her alone with it while I went to the bathroom.)

She once attempted to disconnect her monitor so she could move her desktop computer from her living room to her home office. Assuming she could work her way through this I talked her through it over the phone.

Me: “See those screws on either side of the plug leading from the monitor? Yes…the TV-looking part. Now, just unscrew them both, GENTLY pull the plug out and wait for uncle Harold to carry it upstairs for you…okay?”

Her: “Boy there sure are a lot of screws back here, are you sure I have to unscrew them ALL?”

Me: “No, no just the two on the plug from the monitor. Yes, the TV. Just those two, leave the other screws alone, okay?”

I still got stuck at her house an hour later putting her monitor back together AND lugging her old CRT monitor and computer to her home office.

I am my family’s official tech meddler. And they LOVE me for it! Need a printer installed…on the home network? I’m your man. I’ll even connect everyone’s laptops to it, too! Replacing the wireless router and need to rebuild the network from square one? This guy! My folks leave their laptops open and running (and unguarded) so I take the initiative to resolve all the update warnings I find on the lower-right corners of the screens. When I find a tech issue, I give a half suggestion/half ultimatum about what I’m going to do about it. Then they give me $20 to fix it NOW. I believe I wrote before about the time my parents freaked out after the first time they turned on our Sony Blu-ray player and saw the Home menu’s interface.